Got the offerSDE2 at Microsoft
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 2-3 Weeks
- Rounds
- 3
- Format
- Remote
- Applied via
- Company Website
How it went
If you don’t know something, don’t bluff. Just say I’m not 100% sure, but here’s how I would reason about it.
What they would tell you
If you don’t know something, don’t bluff. Just say I’m not 100% sure, but here’s how I would reason about it.
How to prepare
Microsoft interviews don’t require you to solve 20-problem-a-day. But they do expect you to be rock-solid with fundamentals
- Graphs (BFS, DFS, Union-Find)
- Trees + recursion patterns
- Sliding window, two pointers
- Hashing most problem cover these pattern
Round by round
- 1
Coding Round60 min
The question was quite close to the number of connected components in an undirected graph, I solved it comfortably and also discussed alternative approaches
- 2
Low Level Design Round60 min
The interviewer asked me to design a Library Management System. I had to explain
- Class design (Books, Users, Librarian, BookCopy, SearchCatalog, Transactions)
- Key operations (search, reserve, checkout, return)
- Handling overdue books, notifications
- Preventing duplicate reservations
- How to maintain consistency of BookCopies I implemented 90% of the code in the language of my choice
- 3
HLD Round60 min
The problem statement was simple, designing a Rate Limiter. but the interviewer added some twists to see how I handled edge cases. We discussed:
- Token bucket, sliding window, fixed window
- How to scale rate limiting in distributed systems
- Using Redis to store counters and tokens Asked some follow-up related to Redis
What came up
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.
Sources
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